If all was happy in Bon Temps the last time you watched True Blood, then read no further … then again, things were never that happy in Bon Temps.

Sunday's episode of the HBO drama began with a few phone calls.

Still reeling from the deaths of her best friend Tara and her boyfriend, Alcide, Sookie (Anna Paquin) was tasked with breaking the news of the werewolf's death to his father, Jackson (Robert Patrick), while Jason (Ryan Kwanten) called up his former best friend, Hoyt Fortenberry (Jim Parrack, making his first appearance on the show since season 5), to inform him that his mother had been killed by a vampire.

There's less than 50 days to go before True Blood's seventh and final season starts and fans are licking their lips with anticipation over what happens to Sookie, Bill and the rest of Bon Temps's residents.

Season 6 left off with the the Louisiana town fighting off an invasion of crazed vampires infected with Hep V, and while it's a pretty safe bet that there will be blood in the final 10 episodes of the hit show, these first-look pics show the cast (including Anna Paquin, Stephen Moyer, Ryan Kwanten and Joe Manganiello) looking surprisingly splatter-free.

Speaking at the Entertainment Tonight/PEOPLE Emmy party after Sunday's big event, Ryan Kwanten – the hottie who plays dumb-as-a-rock but well-meaning Bon Temps good ol' boy Jason Stackhouse on HBO's True Blood – said he may have been the only person not to have figured out that his costars Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer were in a relationship.

"I'm always the last to know. My ear is not very close to the ground," he said. "Stephen actually had to come up to me and tell me. He said, 'Ryan I know you're not really up with the gossip side of things. but before you hear from anyone else, we've been dating for the last 10 months.' "

The resident lothario of HBO's True Blood, Jason Stackhouse, isn't what you'd call a deep thinker, but the actor who plays him, Australian Ryan Kwanten, says assuming the role of such a glorious dimwit calls for some interesting acting techniques.

"I pride myself on my half-sentences, that's how I get by," he told PEOPLE with a laugh at Tuesday's grand opening of the Katsuya L.A. Live Restaurant at the Nokia Theater Complex, to benefit After-School All-Stars. "It's always, dot-dot-dot after everything that I say, it just makes things easier. I've always loved the notion that stupidity won't kill you, it will just make you sweat. So, I think that Jason lives in this perpetual state of sweating."